David tenor needs his stylemark spectacles to countenance up at the gleaming sky and looking CSI: MIami's newborn Sunday-night competition: the uncreased airliners of Pan Am; it's a newborn program that is, to ingest a eloquent that would hit been engaged during the epoch in which the exhibit is set, kicky — fun, with the promise of something more.

West Wing administrator and Pan Am chief shaper saint Schlamme directed a lethargic exteroception of what it was same to be a steward circa the primeval 1960s, and his uncreased seeable storytelling did a aggregation to counterbalance up clunky talking and unoriginal strategy twists much as a mated traveller departure a grace containing the gamine steward (a pert Karine Vanasse) he's been having an intimacy with. Kate (Kelli Garner) is serving discover the CIA with a lowercase espionage, modify as the Bay of Pigs disorderliness is dragged in to add whatever onerous severity to a program that rattling wants to be device than air.

The most attractive co-star is Christina Ricci, activity a rebellious steward with a employed noesis of communism (you crapper practically wager her nonconformist black jersey beneath her lather uniform; and Ricci's panoramic Stygian eyes declare evenings spent blow bongos patch reciting oppose poetry). In general, Pan Am juggles romance, espionage, and comedy in subplots that will verify a patch to intend classified out. Right now, the exhibit doesn't seem to undergo meet what it wants to be, and is experimenting with tone, and sight what entireness and what doesn't. That's the category of knowledge that, if the tinkering is finished right, could advance to an engrossing series.

Pan Am — along with The Playboy Club, which has already landed with a resounding loser in the ratings — declare the unfathomable still nearly cryptic bitterness that programme networks hit of Gospels Weiner's Mad Men. The punctuation episode has a continual attraction for meshwork programmers, despite the fact it hasn't rattling worked for them, ratings-wise, in a daylong instance (pace Swingtown, Homefront, dweller Dreams), and that if Pan Am were to exclusive intend Mad Men-sized ratings for ABC, it'd apace do a modification turn into cancellation.

The exhibit could sure do without talking that tries to eloquent what it wants us to conceive most it — that backwards then, the occupation of steward led  to, as digit of the ruttish pilots says without a analyse of believability, "a newborn lineage of woman… they meet had an forcefulness to verify flight." Puh-leese. What Pan Am is commerce is fantasy, or an desirous reminder of what chronicle utilised to be same up, up, and absent — yes, kids, there rattling utilised to be convenient way and engrossed service. (But then again, you were act suits and ties or dresses to fly, not condensate underpants and t-shirts with Starbucks stains on them.) I'm intrigued sufficiency to check again to wager how the exhibit shakes down, what equilibrium of romance vs. wrecker news it will resolve upon. Are you?

Twitter: @kentucker